Writing Down The Bones: Freeing The Writer Within (6 page)

Give yourself some space before you decide to write those big volumes. Learn to trust the force of your own voice. Naturally, it will evolve a direction and a need for one, but it will come from a different place than your need to be an achiever. Writing is not a McDonald’s hamburger. The cooking is slow, and in the beginning you are not sure whether a roast or a banquet or a lamb chop will be the result.

Obsessions

E
VERY ONCE IN
a while I make a list of my obsessions. Some obsessions change and there are always more. Some are thankfully forgotten.

Writers end up writing about their obsessions. Things that haunt them; things they can’t forget; stories they carry in their bodies waiting to be released.

I have my writing groups make lists of their obsessions so that they can see what they unconsciously (and consciously) spend their waking hours thinking about. After you write them down you can put them to good use. You have a list of things to write about. And your main obsessions have power; they are what you will come back to in your writing over and over again. And you’ll create new stories around them. So you might as well give in to them. They probably take over your life whether you want them to or not, so you ought to get them to work for you.

One of my obsessions is my Jewish family. Every once in a while I decide I’ve written enough about them. I don’t want to sound like a momma’s girl. There are other things in the world to write about. It is true that there are other topics and they do come up naturally, but when I have made a conscious decision to not write about my family, the act of repressing it seems to repress everything else too, simply because I am spending a lot of energy avoiding something.

It’s like when I decide to go on a diet. Right after I make that decision, food seems to be the only real thing on earth, and as I drive the car, run down the block, write in my journal—all these actions become ways of avoiding the one thing I suddenly really want. For me, it works better to give food and hunger a space in my life, but in a friendly way so that I don’t destructively devour twelve cookies at a time.

Just so with writing about my family. Give them a few pages and they will take their place in the Hall of Obsessions and allow me space for other topics. Try to squelch them and they turn the corner in every one-horse-town poem I’ve ever written—even an Iowa farm wife begins to sound like she’s about to make blintzes.

I learned once from a recovering alcoholic that at parties alcoholics always know where the liquor is, how much there is, how much they’ve drunk, and where they are going to get their next drink. I have never cared that much about liquor, but I know I love chocolate. After hearing about an alcoholic’s behavior, I watched myself. The next day I was at a friend’s. His roommate was making brownies. We had to go to a show before the brownies were out of the oven. I was aware that subtly throughout the whole movie I was thinking about those brownies. I couldn’t wait to get back and have one. When the show was finished, we coincidentally met some friends who suggested that we go out some place to talk. I saw myself get panicky: I wanted those brownies. I made up a quick excuse why we had to return to my friend’s house before we went on with the evening.

We are run by our compulsions. Maybe it’s just me. But it seems that obsessions have power. Harness that power. I know most of my writing friends are obsessed with writing. It works in the same way as chocolate does. We’re always thinking we should be writing no matter what else we might be doing. It’s not fun. The life of an artist isn’t easy. You’re never free unless you are doing your art. But I guess doing art is better than drinking a lot or filling up with chocolate. I often wonder if all the writers who are alcoholics drink a lot because they aren’t writing or are having trouble writing. It is not because they are writers that they are drinking, but because they are writers who are not writing.

There is freedom in being a writer and writing. It is fulfilling your function. I used to think freedom meant doing whatever you want. It means knowing who you are, what you are supposed to be doing on this earth, and then simply doing it. It is not getting sidetracked, thinking you shouldn’t write any more about your Jewish family when that’s your role in life: to record their history, who they were in Brooklyn, on Long Island, at Miami Beach—the first generation of American Goldbergs—before it all passes and is gone.

Katagiri Roshi says: “Poor artists. They suffer very much. They finish a masterpiece and they are not satisfied. They want to go on and do another.” Yes, but it’s better to go on and do another if you have the urge than to start drinking and become an alcoholic or eat a pound of good fudge and get fat.

So perhaps not all obsessions are bad. An obsession for peace is good. But then be peaceful. Don’t just think about it. An obsession for writing is good. But then write. Don’t let it get twisted into drinking. An obsession for chocolate is not good. I know. It’s unhealthy and doesn’t help the world the way peace and writing do.

Carolyn Forché, a poet who won the Lamont Poetry Award for her book
The Country Between Us
, about El Salvador, said, “Change your innermost obsessions to become a political writer.” That makes sense. You don’t write about politics by
thinking
you should. That will become doggerel. Start caring about politics, reading about it, talking about it, and don’t worry about what it will do to your writing. When it becomes an obsession, you will naturally write about it.

Original Detail

T
HOUGH THIS IS
a short chapter, it is an important one: use original detail in your writing. Life is so rich, if you can write down the real details of the way things were and are, you hardly need anything else. Even if you transplant the beveled windows, slow-rotating Rheingold sign, Wise potato chip rack, and tall red stools from the Aero Tavern that you drank in in New York into a bar in a story in another state and time, the story will have authenticity and groundedness. “Oh, no, that bar was on Long Island, I can’t put it in New Jersey”—yes, you can. You don’t have to be rigid about original detail. The imagination is capable of detail transplants, but using the details you actually know and have seen will give your writing believability and truthfulness. It creates a good solid foundation from which you can build.

Naturally, if you have just been to New Orleans in the dripping August heat and have sucked the fat out of the heads of crayfish at the Magnolia Bar on St. Charles Avenue, you can’t have the thick-wristed character in your story in Cleveland on a January night doing the same thing at his local bar. It won’t work, unless, of course, you are moving into surrealism, where all boundaries begin to melt.

Be awake to the details around you, but don’t be self-conscious. “Okay. I’m at a wedding. The bride has on blue. The groom is wearing a red carnation. They are serving chopped liver on doilies.” Relax, enjoy the wedding, be present with an open heart. You will naturally take in your environment, and later, sitting at your desk, you will be able to recall just how it was dancing with the bride’s redheaded mother, seeing the bit of red lipstick smeared on her front tooth when she smiled, and smelling her perfume mixed with perspiration.

The Power of Detail

I
AM IN
Costa’s Chocolate Shop in Owatonna, Minnesota. My friend is opposite me. We’ve just finished Greek salads and are writing in our notebooks for a half hour among glasses of water, a half-sipped Coke, and a cup of coffee with milk. The booths are orange, and near the front counter are lines of cream candies dipped in chocolate. Across the street is the Owatonna Bank, designed by Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright’s teacher. Inside the bank is a large cow mural and beautiful stained-glass windows.

Our lives are at once ordinary and mythical. We live and die, age beautifully or full of wrinkles. We wake in the morning, buy yellow cheese, and hope we have enough money to pay for it. At the same instant we have these magnificent hearts that pump through all sorrow and all winters we are alive on the earth. We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded. This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand. We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived. Let it be known, the earth passed before us. Our details are important. Otherwise, if they are not, we can drop a bomb and it doesn’t matter.

Yad Vashem, a memorial for the Holocaust, is in Jerusalem. It has a whole library that catalogs the names of the six million martyrs. Not only did the library have their names, it also had where they lived, were born, anything that could be found out about them. These people existed and they mattered.
Yad
Vashem
, as a matter of fact, actually means “memorial to the name.” It was not nameless masses that were slaughtered; they were human beings.

Likewise, in Washington, D.C., there is the Vietnam Memorial. There are fifty thousand names listed—middle names, too—of American soldiers killed in Vietnam. Real human beings with names were killed and their breaths moved out of this world. There was the name of Donald Miller, my secondgrade friend who drew tanks, soldiers, and ships in the margins of all his math papers. Seeing names makes us remember. A name is what we carry all our life, and we respond to its call in a classroom, to its pronunciation at a graduation, or to our name whispered in the night.

It is important to say the names of who we are, the names of the places we have lived, and to write the details of our lives. “I lived on Coal Street in Albuquerque next to a garage and carried paper bags of groceries down Lead Avenue. One person had planted beets early that spring, and I watched their red/green leaves grow.”

We have lived; our moments are important. This is what it is to be a writer: to be the carrier of details that make up history, to care about the orange booths in the coffee shop in Owatonna.

Recording the details of our lives is a stance against bombs with their mass ability to kill, against too much speed and efficiency. A writer must say yes to life, to all of life: the water glasses, the Kemp’s half-and-half, the ketchup on the counter. It is not a writer’s task to say, “It is dumb to live in a small town or to eat in a café when you can eat macrobiotic at home.” Our task is to say a holy yes to the real things of our life as they exist—the real truth of who we are: several pounds overweight, the gray, cold street outside, the Christmas tinsel in the showcase, the Jewish writer in the orange booth across from her blond friend who has black children. We must become writers who accept things as they are, come to love the details, and step forward with a yes on our lips so there can be no more noes in the world, noes that invalidate life and stop these details from continuing.

Baking a Cake

W
HEN YOU BAKE
a cake, you have ingredients: sugar, flour, butter, baking soda, eggs, milk. You put them in a bowl and mix them up, but this does not make a cake. This makes goop. You have to put them in the oven and add heat or energy to transform it into cake, and the cake looks nothing like its original ingredients. It’s a lot like parents unable to claim their hippie kids as their own in the sixties. Milk and eggs look at their pound cake and say, “Not ours.” Not egg, not milk, but Ph.D. daughter of refugee parents—a foreigner in her own home.

In a sense this is what writing is like. You have all these ingredients, the details of your life, but just to list them is not enough. “I was born in Brooklyn. I have a mother and a father. I am female.” You must add the heat and energy of your heart. This is not just any father; this is your father. The character who smoked cigars and put too much ketchup on his steak. The one you loved and hated. You can’t just mix the ingredients in a bowl; they have no life. You must become one with the details in love or hate; they become an extension of your body. Nabokov says, “Caress the divine details.” He doesn’t say, “Jostle them in place or bang them around.”
Caress
them, touch them tenderly. Care about what is around you. Let your whole body touch the river you are writing about, so if you call it yellow or stupid or slow, all of you is feeling it. There should be no separate you when you are deeply engaged. Katagiri Roshi said: “When you do zazen [sitting meditation], you should be gone. So zazen does zazen. Not Steve or Barbara does zazen.” This is also how you should be when you write: writing does writing. You disappear: you are simply recording the thoughts that are streaming through you.

The cake is baking in the oven. All that heat goes into the making of that cake. The heat is not distracted, thinking, “Oh, I wanted it to be a chocolate cake, not a pound cake.” You don’t think as you write, “Oh, I don’t like my life, I should have been born in Illinois.” You don’t think. You accept what is and put down its truth. Katagiri Roshi has said: “Literature will tell you what life is, but it won’t tell you how to get out of it.”

Ovens can be very cantankerous sometimes, and you might have to learn ways to turn your heat on. Timing your writing adds pressure and helps to heat things up and blast through the internal censor. Also, keeping your hand moving and not stopping add to the heat, so a beautiful cake may rise out of the mixture of your daily details. If you find yourself checking the clock too much as you write, say to yourself you are going to keep writing until three (or four or five) pages, both sides, are filled or until the cake is baked, however long that takes. And you are never sure once the heat begins whether you will get a devil’s food or an angel food cake. There are no guarantees; don’t worry. They’re both good to eat.

There are people who try to use heat only, without ingredients, to make a cake. The heat is cozy and feels good, but when you’re done, there’s not much there for anyone else to eat. That’s usually abstract writing: we get a sense there is great warmth there, but we have nothing to bite into. If you use details, you become better skilled at conveying your ecstasy or sorrow. So while you fly around in the heat of the oven, bring in the batter in the pan so we know exactly what your feelings taste like, so we may be a gourmet of them: “Oh, it’s a pound cake, a brownie, a light lemon soufflé.” That is what her feelings feel like. Not “It was great, it was great!” Yes, it was great, but how great? Give us the flavor. In other words, use details. They are the basic unit of writing.